Levin turned quickly, and walked away from him into the depths of the
avenue, and he went on walking up and down alone. Soon he heard the
rumble of the trap, and saw from behind the trees how Vassenka, sitting in
the hay (unluckily there was no seat in the trap) in his Scotch cap, was
driven along the avenue, jolting up and down over the ruts.
“What’s this?” Levin thought, when a footman ran out of the house and
stopped the trap. It was the mechanician, whom Levin had totally forgotten.
The mechanician, bowing low, said something to Veslovsky, then clambered
into the trap, and they drove off together.
Stepan Arkadyevitch and the princess were much upset by Levin’s action.
And he himself felt not only in the highest degree ridicule, but also utterly
guilty and disgraced. But remembering what sufferings he and his wife had
been through, when he asked himself how he should act another time, he
answered that he should do just the same again.
In spite of all this, towards the end of that day, everyone except the
princess, who could not pardon Levin’s action, became extraordinarily
lively and good-humored, like children after a punishment or grown-up
people after a dreary, ceremonious reception, so that by the evening
Vassenka’s dismissal was spoken of, in the absence of the princess, as
though it were some remote event. And Dolly, who had inherited her
father’s gift of humorous storytelling, made Varenka helpless with laughter
as she related for the third and fourth time, always with fresh humorous
additions, how she had only just put on her new shoes for the benefit of the
visitor, and on going into the drawing-room, heard suddenly the rumble of
the trap. And who should be in the trap but Vassenka himself, with his
Scotch cap, and his songs and his gaiters, and all, sitting in the hay.
“If only you’d ordered out the carriage! But no! and then I hear: ‘Stop!’
Oh, I thought they’ve relented. I look out, and behold a fat German being
sat down by him and driving away…. And my new shoes all for nothing!…”
Chapter 16
Darya Alexandrovna carried out her intention and went to see Anna. She
was sorry to annoy her sister and to do anything Levin disliked. She quite
understood how right the Levins were in not wishing to have anything to do
with Vronsky. But she felt she must go and see Anna, and show her that her
feelings could not be changed, in spite of the change in her position. That
she might be independent of the Levins in this expedition, Darya
Alexandrovna sent to the village to hire horses for the drive; but Levin
learning of it went to her to protest.
“What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if I did
dislike it, I should still more dislike your not taking my horses,” he said.
“You never told me that you were going for certain. Hiring horses in the
village is disagreeable to me, and, what’s of more importance, they’ll
undertake the job and never get you there. I have horses. And if you don’t
want to wound me, you’ll take mine.”
Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and on the day fixed Levin had
ready for his sister-in-law a set of four horses and relays, getting them
together from the farm and saddle-horses—not at all a smart-looking set,
but capable of taking Darya Alexandrovna the whole distance in a single
day. At that moment, when horses were wanted for the princess, who was
going, and for the midwife, it was a difficult matter for Levin to make up
the number, but the duties of hospitality would not let him allow Darya
Alexandrovna to hire horses when staying in his house. Moreover, he was
well aware that the twenty roubles that would be asked for the journey were
a serious matter for her; Darya Alexandrovna’s pecuniary affairs, which
were in a very unsatisfactory state, were taken to heart by the Levins as if
they were their own.
Darya Alexandrovna, by Levin’s advice, started before daybreak. The
road was good, the carriage comfortable, the horses trotted along merrily,
and on the box, besides the coachman, sat the counting-house clerk, whom
Levin was sending instead of a groom for greater security. Darya
Alexandrovna dozed and waked up only on reaching the inn where the
horses were to be changed.
After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant’s with whom Levin had
stayed on the way to Sviazhsky’s, and chatting with the women about their
children, and with the old man about Count Vronsky, whom the latter
praised very highly, Darya Alexandrovna, at ten o’clock, went on again. At
home, looking after her children, she had no time to think. So now, after
this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed
swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her life as she never had
before, and from the most different points of view. Her thoughts seemed
strange even to herself. At first she thought about the children, about whom
she was uneasy, although the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon
her) had promised to look after them. “If only Masha does not begin her
naughty tricks, if Grisha isn’t kicked by a horse, and Lily’s stomach isn’t
upset again!” she thought. But these questions of the present were
succeeded by questions of the immediate future. She began thinking how
she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the coming winter, to renew the
drawing-room furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak. Then questions
of the more remote future occurred to her: how she was to place her
children in the world. “The girls are all right,” she thought; “but the boys?”
“It’s very well that I’m teaching Grisha, but of course that’s only because
I am free myself now, I’m not with child. Stiva, of course, there’s no
counting on. And with the help of good-natured friends I can bring them up;
but if there’s another baby coming?…” And the thought struck her how
untruly it was said that the curse laid on woman was that in sorrow she
should bring forth children.
“The birth itself, that’s nothing; but the months of carrying the child—
that’s what’s so intolerable,” she thought, picturing to herself her last
pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And she recalled the conversation
she had just had with the young woman at the inn. On being asked whether
she had any children, the handsome young woman had answered cheerfully:
“I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.”
“Well, did you grieve very much for her?” asked Darya Alexandrovna.
“Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was only
a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie.”
This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of the
good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she could not
help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was indeed a grain
of truth.
“Yes, altogether,” thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her
whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life, “pregnancy,
sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to everything, and most of all—
hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her looks;
and I when I’m with child become hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony,
the hideous agonies, that last moment … then the nursing, the sleepless
nights, the fearful pains….”
Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from
sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child. “Then the
children’s illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them up;
evil propensities” (she thought of little Masha’s crime among the
raspberries), “education, Latin—it’s all so incomprehensible and difficult.
And on the top of it all, the death of these children.” And there rose again
before her imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her mother’s
heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of croup; his funeral,
the callous indifference of all at the little pink coffin, and her own torn
heart, and her lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little brow with its
projecting temples, and the open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin
at the moment when it was being covered with the little pink lid with a
cross braided on it.
“And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m wasting
my life, never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or nursing a
child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and worrying others,
repulsive to my husband, while the children are growing up unhappy, badly
educated, and penniless. Even now, if it weren’t for spending the summer at
the Levins’, I don’t know how we should be managing to live. Of course
Kostya and Kitty have so much tact that we don’t feel it; but it can’t go on.
They’ll have children, they won’t be able to keep us; it’s a drag on them as
it is. How is papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us? So
that I can’t even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with
the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if we suppose
the greatest good luck, that the children don’t die, and I bring them up
somehow. At the very best they’ll simply be decent people. That’s all I can
hope for. And to gain simply that—what agonies, what toil!… One’s whole
life ruined!” Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had said,
and again she was revolted at the thought; but she could not help admitting
that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.
“Is it far now, Mihail?” Darya Alexandrovna asked the counting-house
clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were frightening her.
“From this village, they say, it’s five miles.” The carriage drove along the
village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge was a crowd of peasant
women with coils of ties for the sheaves on their shoulders, gaily and
noisily chattering. They stood still on the bridge, staring inquisitively at the
carriage. All the faces turned to Darya Alexandrovna looked to her healthy
and happy, making her envious of their enjoyment of life. “They’re all
living, they’re all enjoying life,” Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she
had passed the peasant women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated
comfortably on the soft springs of the old carriage, “while I, let out, as it
were from prison, from the world of worries that fret me to death, am only
looking about me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women
and my sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see—all,
but not I.
“And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a
husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while
Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She wants to live. God has
put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same. Even to this
day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when
she came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband and
have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been loved in reality.
And is it any better as it is? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,” she
thought about her husband, “and I put up with him. Is that any better? At
that time I could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,” Darya
Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look at
herself in the looking-glass. She had a traveling looking-glass in her
handbag, and she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the
coachman and the swaying counting-house clerk, she felt that she would be
ashamed if either of them were to look round, and she did not take out the
glass.
But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it was not too
late; and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was always particularly
attentive to her, of Stiva’s good-hearted friend, Turovtsin, who had helped
her nurse her children through the scarlatina, and was in love with her. And
there was someone else, a quite young man, who—her husband had told her
it as a joke—thought her more beautiful than either of her sisters. And the
most passionate and impossible romances rose before Darya
Alexandrovna’s imagination. “Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall
never reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes another person happy,
and she’s not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was,
